


hope is a dangerous thing to have

by arrowsanonymous



Category: The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Other, uhhhhh remember when apollo said its been 6 months, yeah - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-29
Updated: 2020-05-29
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:08:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24437962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arrowsanonymous/pseuds/arrowsanonymous
Summary: have you ever wondered what it was like for apollo in those six months before he was thrown onto earth?
Relationships: Apollo & Artemis (Percy Jackson)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 96





	hope is a dangerous thing to have

_i._

Apollo’s forgotten where he is.

He lives. He senses things around him. All he can find, though, is darkness and pain, as if he’s mixed with the primordial deity Chaos and the deity is not amused about it. His very essence floats around in mid-air, suspended by nothing and everything at once, and he _knows_ that he knows where he is. He’s just… lost the name.

What he still remembers, though, is enough to keep him sane; Artemis’ lupine, yellow eyes and her relentless gaze, Hermes’ laugh at those rare times he’s taken a break from work and they decide to prank someone, Aphrodite’s frown at an outfit she dislikes whenever they go shopping—everything, every vivid detail, swirls around in his head. Or at least whatever passes as his head in this strange, timeless place.

But his memory, his oh-so-perfect memory, remembers everything. Not just the good ones, but the bad ones, too, and Apollo clings to these memories more than the good ones, because pain grounds a person better than joy every will.

Zeus’ lightning bolt. The first time he is cast down onto earth as a mortal. His shame and anger at turning Hemithea into an immortal. Daphne. Hyacinthus. All of the people he’d failed; all of the people he’d angered: they mix into the happy memories.

It’s okay. He doesn’t mind. He won’t forget who he is, at least.

  
  


_ii_.

What is this place?

Everything begins to blur together. Apollo still remembers everything, but some of those memories are unraveling like an old tapestry having a loose string pulled away. Was it Hermes, or was it Ares that had helped him pull practical jokes on minor deities? Did Aphrodite like the yellow tank top they’d found in the 00’s?

The only constant that he knows of in this strange, dark, abyss, is pain. The dull ache from the ever-fluctuating state of being he’s been forced into is one thing that he grasps desperately, like a man being offered a flimsy thread as a lifeline to keep him from drowning. _Honeysuckle._ He remembers honeysuckle.

Artemis smells like it. Artemis is his sister. His sister with the flowing red hair and woflish huntress’ eyes, built like a hunter and trained as one. But even she has a smell, and that’s another thing he clings to desperately to keep himself sane.

 _Something else._ His mind desperately scrables to grasp another memory, something that can help, _something, anything—_ and Apollo remembers the first time Zeus strikes him with a lightning bolt, heavy-fisted even towards his favorite, golden boy.

Pain is easier to hold onto than happiness, but he has hope. Artemis will find and save him.

  
  


_iii._

Salvation seems too good to be true.

Apollo is a god, and gods are divine beings with no flaws whatsoever—or so he thought. Now, eons into his inprisonment, stripped of power and a physical form, he begins to mull this over. How many people has he failed to save? If he has a drop of blood for everyone he’s killed without a second thought and for everyone he had let die, he’d drown the world in it.

Maybe, he doesn’t deserve to get out of this abyss. Maybe he deserves this punishment. Maybe he deserves the slow, deliberate flaying of his very being to atone for his mistakes. Or, maybe he doesn’t. He’s still a god, after all. Zeus has more mistakes to make up for than he does, and yet he stands tall and proud as the leader of the gods.

But Apollo can’t recall how and why he’s here, helpless and trapped, stripped of his identity and most of his memories. All he can remember of Artemis is yellow eyes and the glint of the moon. What else will he lose? Will he lose memories of Hyacinthus, too? Will he lose his very being, fading into nonexistence like Helios and Selene has?

Oh, what he wouldn’t give for another moment in his sun chariot. Another moment in the mortal world. Maybe even another moment fighting in the second Titan War. Anything but this strange place that feels too much like Tartarus. Apollo feels horrible for the demigods Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase. He can’t imagine what they’d gone through, the suffering, the terror, the pain. Do they feel as hopeless as he does? How can a god of his caliber stoop to the demigods’ level?

How long will he need to bear this burden?

_iv._

He can’t tell how long he’s been trapped in this non-corporeal form.

As the sun god, out of all things, Apollo is a creature of _light_ . He believes in things you can see, both tangible and intangible, things you can feel, things you can hear. Here, in this chasm that Apollo has started to suspect is Tartarus _(but what is that?—what is that, he should remember, he doesn’t),_ he can sense nothing but the feeling of dread and the vague, dulled ache that he supposes is pain that has long carved away at his very being and dampens the way he feels.

Memories slip away from him like sand through fingers, with only the barest slivers of what he had once been able to recall easily remaining. He remembers a flash of red hair and honeysuckle. He remembers laughter. They fade away, leaving him with nothing to hold onto.

 _Who could’ve done this to me?_ He can feel _himself_ fading away, barely tethered to existence by his stubbornness and the smell of honeysuckle and _petrichor._ It’s almost like someone’s slowly scraping away his essence with a chisel, painful and labor-intensive, yet effective nonetheless.

He repeats one name like a spell, as if that if he stops thinking _(does he think when he has no form?)_ about the word, he will finally fade away: _Artemis, Artemis, Artemis, Artemis,_ but it blurs together like the days and the memories until it sounds like a nervous soprano warming up her voice… if he can remember what a soprano sounds like.

Apollo, the god of music, has forgotten sound.

_v._

_A—_

vi.

_I simply woke up falling. Skyscrapers spiraled in and out of view. Flames streamed off my body. I tried to fly. I tried to change into a cloud or teleport across the world or do a hundred other things that should have been easy for me, but I just kept falling. I plunged into a narrow canyon between two buildings and BAM!_

_Is anything sadder than the sound of a god hitting a pile of garbage bags?_

_I lay groaning and aching in the open Dumpster. My nostrils burned with the stench of rancid bologna and used diapers. My ribs felt broken, though that shouldn’t have been possible._

_My mind stewed in confusion, but one memory floated to the surface—the voice of my father, Zeus:_

_YOUR FAULT. YOUR PUNISHMENT._

_I realized what had happened to me. And I sobbed in despair._

_Even for a god of poetry such as myself, it is difficult to describe how I felt. How could you—a mere mortal—possibly understand? Imagine being stripped of your clothes, then blasted with a fire hose in front of a laughing crowd. Imagine the ice-cold water filling your mouth and lungs, the pressure bruising your skin, turning your joints to putty. Imagine feeling helpless, ashamed, completely vulnerable— publicly and brutally stripped of everything that makes you you. My humiliation was worse than that._

_YOUR FAULT, Zeus’s voice rang in my head._

_“No!” I cried miserably. “No, it wasn’t! Please!”_

_Nobody answered. On either side of me, rusty fire escapes zigzagged up brick walls. Above, the winter sky was gray and unforgiving._

**Author's Note:**

> hope you like it! the last part (vi.) is from the hidden oracle because i am a slut for intertwining canon & fic together <3


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